Quotes from Aldous Huxley

Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity

One entered the world, Denis pursued, having ready-made ideas about everything. One had a philosophy and tried to make life fit into it. One should have lived first and then made one's philosophy to fit life...Life, facts, things were horribly complicated; ideas, even the most difficult of them, deceptively simple. In the world of ideas, everything was clear; in life all was obscure, embroiled. Was it surprising that one was miserable, horribly unhappy?

Grief doesn't kill, love doesn't kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkels and softens the body while it still lives, tots it like a medlar, kills it too at last.

That was the chief difference between literature and life. In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art.

A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.

Wild inside; raging, writhing—yes, writhing was the word, writhing with desire. But outwardly he was hopelessly tame; outwardly—baa, baa, baa.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

The moral is plain. Avoid, if possible, being bored yourself or boring others.

The question for the man of sense is: Do we or do we not want to go to hell? And his answer is: No, we don't. And if that's his answer, then he won't have anything to do with any of the politicians. Because they all want to land us in hell.

What I know of the divine sciences and Holy Scripture, I learnt in woods and fields. I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks." And

Familiarity breeds indifference.